Confindustria, Garrone leaves: 'Signal of unity'. Orsini towards the presidency: 'Now to unite in a project of unity'

A long letter and the announcement that he wants to take a step back. Edoardo Garrone has decided to quit the race for the presidency of Confindustria, on the eve of the General Council meeting called tomorrow, 4 April, precisely to vote on Carlo Bonomi's successor at the helm of the association. Garrone and Emanuele Orsini had arrived at the vote, based on the consensus obtained and ratified by the three wise men.

"For a strong Confindustria it is first of all necessary to put a candidate in a position to be able to choose his own team and structure freely, without any conditioning and negotiation that would make him weak and sanction his failure right from the start," writes Garrone, according to an Ansa agency that reports excerpts of the text. Garrone then announces: 'the choice of putting the end before the person requires me to take a step back and allow Emanuele Orsini to find those ideal conditions to lead Confindustria without conditioning and to do so with a great sense of responsibility, in the name of a collective end that is much more important than us individuals'.

After "strong fractures and strong tensions", Confindustria "does not need a candidate to win by a few votes, perhaps the result of excessive 'commitments or exchanges' that are intolerable and unacceptable to me", writes Edoardo Garrone, announcing a step back in the race for the presidency: "Only by supporting a single candidate and putting him in the ideal condition in terms of strength and autonomy can we guarantee the best governability for our Confindustria". And he emphasises: 'It is a renunciation that personally costs me a lot, but which I trust can bring about a behavioural and substantial change, making me and us proud to have done it and to have contributed to a dutiful historical change, expressing a way of being at the service of the system and not a system at the service of oneself'.

"Before sending this letter," writes Edoardo Garrone, "I informed Emanuele (Orsini) of my choice, of the reasons that determined it, of the strong responsibility entrusted to him, and of the certainty that the success of the decisions he will take with autonomy and responsibility, and in the wake of shared values and goals, will be the success of us all.

In his letter, Garrone goes over the motivations that had prompted him to stand as a candidate and now to take 'a step back'. His idea was that of 'a presidency at the service of Confindustria and not a Confindustria at the service of the President, an objective that stemmed from the desire to return to the fundamentals of our system of representation and its values, to that spirit that has driven us and engaged us for many years, representing interests for the growth of the competitiveness of the Italian industrial system', 'avoiding stimulating internal conflicts that, in recent weeks, months and years, have unfortunately brought out regrettable aspects of our system'. Furthermore, he continued, 'I have imagined and conceived a Confindustria in which the President must never run for external political roles during his term of office, a Confindustria that does not accept exchanges with politics, a strong Presidency with an authoritative and inclusive team that respects the will and resolutions of the Presidency and General Council. A Confindustria that knows how to conquer its role every day, that always knows how to be a cultural vanguard, both within our associative world and externally" and a Confindustria that is "the protagonist of a season of reforms" both internally and externally.